Mind if I rant a little? Thanks.
It's been one of those days...in Computer Heck. (It's not Computer Hell, 'cause I still have my hard-drive, and if nothing is working any better than it did when I started, nothing is working worse--at least so far.) First of all, I have a headache, but I'm trying to avoid taking my pain medication (for no good reason, I just feel like I'm cheating somehow if I file the edges off with Tylenol and codeine). That doesn't put me in the greatest of moods to deal with a cranky computer; if I had been as smart as I like to think I am, I would have put it off. On the other hand, I actually don't have anything I have to do today, so I thought it would be a good time to fix some of the things that have been going wrong with The Box.
One of the things that has been a minor annoyance is that ever since I upgraded to Outlook 98 (which I did to improve the connectivity with my Palm Pilot--not that I've noticed any improvement) whenever I fire it up, it whines at me that the PGP plug-in is older than the version of Outlook and may not work properly. Well, short of de-installing PGP, I don't see a way of removing that plug-in or of getting Outlook to shut up about it, so I figured that's one of the things that I'd look at today. Well, it turns out that PGP, Inc has merged with McAfee and some other company to form Network Associates, and while they'll still gladly sell you a copy of PGP-for Personal Privacy 5.0 (from about three different places on the new web-site), it's fallen off the face of their web-site as far as support and downloadable updates. I even went as far as to start ordering the software, to see if there was an obvious upgrade path, but no....The technical support page doesn't list it in the pull-down menu when you submit a request for assistance. I submitted it anyway, under a different product, and I'll see what kind of response I get. If I don't get any satisfaction, I guess I'll scrub it from the hard drive and see if that stops Outlook's complaints. (It's not as if anyone I know actually uses PGP when they e-mail me. They probably should, but I'm not going to push them to do so if the product is unsupported.)
Meanwhile, on the newsreader front, Agent, which is a really slick product except that it doesn't work reliably with my ISP (Forté, the maker of Agent, claims it's Compuserve's fault for having a really slow news server, but Netscape's Collabra Discussion Groups news reader doesn't have any trouble) continues to tantalize me (and you all know the story of Tantalus, right?). When it works, it blows the socks of the Netscape built-in news reader; but when it doesn't...Outlook isn't bad as a newsreader, but, somehow something essential got blown away at some point, and although the news reader continues to come up, it's utterly unable to find any discussion groups on the Compuserve news server, although it claims to connect to the server. Just for the heck of it, I decided to see if there was a new version of IE and Outlook to download (besides, I'd gotten an ominous message from Microsoft about a security hole in IE and Outlook that I should download the patch to, so I figured it was probably about time to do that).
I tried following the link in the e-mail message to the security directory at microsoft.com. Sure enough, it identified that I needed the security patch. Clicked on next to begin downloading--and got an internal server error, please contact your server administrator. Thanks, Microsoft. I gave up on that, and just went to the IE download page and let it sniff my system to see if it thought anything needed updating. Yep, there was a new version of IE, a new Java VM, and some other crap. Sigh. What the hell--I had already decided I wasn't doing anything productive today, so I let it rip. A few hours later (about 2) it was done, and then it started installing. Oops. Everything that it installed complained about a DLL that was meant to be used for NT 3.something only. Then it finished installing, and reported that everything installed correctly. Tried it out, and it seemed to work--but the newsreader still didn't see any newsgroups. Screw it. I reset Netscape as the default newsreader.
I'm seriously considering scrubbing the whole drive and installing Linux. Not that I know anything about Linux, but at least it would be a whole new set of problems, and none of them would have anything to do with Microsoft. Since I don't play any games on the computer, and in fact mostly what I use it for is Internet stuff (like this Web-page, here), and I'm sick to death of Front Page (it now has the habit of switching any graphics that I put on a page to 640*800, regardless of the size it's supposed to be--even if I type in the HTML Height and Width tags by hand. Last time I updated the Bookstore page, I had to do it by FTP) I don't know that I'd lose anything by it, even if I couldn't re-install all my software. Linux is supposed to let you boot to Linux or to Windows, but even if I had to give up Windows entirely, I'm not sure that I'd care at this point--as long as I could still connect to my ISP. And if I couldn't, maybe I'd just get a new ISP. I'm that sick of the whole business.
On the plus side of things, and on my work computer, not my "fun" one, I have a new toy to play with. I downloaded a new programming language called Python Friday, just before I left work, and got a book on it Saturday; today I've been playing around with it while this computer was gronking away loading the latest point-revision of IE, and it's pretty fun. I like reading about computer languages, even ones that I've never actually programmed in (e.g. Forth, and Modula-2), so it's pretty neat to be able to get a freeware language and start hacking around in it. I'm not sure that it's ever going to replace Perl for my little programming projects, but it might--at least for a certain kind of project (ones where the data structures matter more than munging a text file around--you can construct elaborate data structures in Perl, but it's hardly intuitive--at least for me). In case you were wondering, it's itty-bitty Perl programs that keep this site running by feeding you the current day's columns, quotes and lyrics.
Anyway, it's good to get that off my chest, even if it's caused eyes to glaze and fingers to stab at the back button all across this great nation of ours.